Transcript
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: I'd like to introduce to you our 1984 Warfield lecturer, Dr. Lesslie Newbigin. He was born and educated in England. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Cambridge University, he served two years as Intercollegiate Secretary of the Student Christian Movement in Glasgow. He then returned to Cambridge, where he took his theological training at Westminster College.
He was ordained a minister of the Church of Scotland in 1936 and I asked him how it happened that an Englishman became a minister in the Church of Scotland and he replied that he's from Northumberland, which is close to the Scottish border, and many of the English from Northumberland take their wives from across the border, so he has much Scottish blood in his background.
He then went out to the Madras Mission of the Church of Scotland in south India where he served until 1947, with two intervals at home when he worked in the Church of Scotland's foreign missions' office. In 1947, when churches of the Reformed, Congregational, Methodist, and Anglican communions were united in the Church of south India, he was elected one of its bishops and appointed to the diocese of Madurai and Ramnad.
Bishop Newbigin was a delegate at the founding of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948, and he has continued to be active in the Council's commissions. He is the author of many books, but I think it highly significant that now, having retired from his mission work, having returned to England and retired a second time from a teaching career at the university,
he is now in his third pre-retirement phase as the pastor of an urban, inner-city church in Birmingham. It is a great pleasure to welcome Dr. Newbigin to our seminary community. His topic for the Warfield lectures this year is "Post-Enlightenment Culture as a Missiological Problem, subtitle Can the West be Converted?" and his topic tonight is
"The Theory of Cross-Cultural Mission and the Ideology of Pluralism." Dr. Newbigin, we welcome you to Princeton Seminary.
NEWBIGIN: It's a very great privilege to be invited to be the Warfield lecturer. It's a privilege of which I feel completely unworthy, and I say that not only because it is the customary thing to say, and not even because it is true, but because I would like to think that there would be at least one sentence of these lectures to which Dr. Warfield would be able to say, "Amen" without any...
However, even if he was not able to approve of everything that I say, I hope that he would approve of my purpose because the purpose that I am addressing in these lectures is to ask the question, "What would be involved in a genuine missionary encounter between the gospel and the culture which
is shared by the peoples of Europe and North America and their colonial and cultural offshoots, the growing company of educated leaders in all the cities of the world, the culture with which those of us who share in it usually describe as modern?" The phenomenon which is usually called "modernization," and which is being promoted throughout most of the world through the universities
and technical training networks, the multi-national corporations, the media, is in fact the co-option of the leadership of all the nations of the world into this particular culture which had its origins among the peoples of western Europe, perhaps 250 or 300 years ago. For the moment and pending closer definition, I shall simply refer to it as
"modern western culture." The angle from which I'm approaching it is the angle of a foreign missionary. Having spent most of my life as a missionary in India, I was later called to teach missiology and then to become, myself, a missionary in a typical, inner-city situation in urban England. And this succession of roles has forced me to
ask the question that I have posed as the theme of these lectures. "What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living which we call modern western culture?" There's, of course, nothing new in a proposal to discuss the relations between gospel and culture. We have Richard Niebuhr's classic study of five models of
relation between the two. We have had the massive work of Paul Tillich, who was so much concerned with what he called in the title of his very first published lecture, "The Theology of Culture." But this work has mainly been done, as far as I know, by theologians who have not had the experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to transmit the gospel from one culture to a radically different one.
On the other hand, we have had, especially in recent years, a plethora of stories by missionaries on the theological issues raised by cross-cultural missions. As western missionaries have shared in the general weakening of confidence in our modern western culture, they have become more and more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel, they have often confused culturally conditioned
perspectives with the substance of the gospel itself and have so wrongfully claimed divine authority for what they subsequently realized were the relativities of one culture. For some on the liberal wing of protestantism, like W. E. Hocking, Christian missions were almost explicitly absorbed into the worldwide spread of western
culture. But at the other end of the spectrum, the conservative evangelicals were often, without realizing it perhaps, guilty of -- as many of them now recognize -- confusing the gospel with the values of the American way of life. But in the last couple of decades, there has been a spate of missionary writing, a great deal
of it from evangelical circles on the problems of contextualization. This rather horrible word has been preferred to the older terms "indigenization" and "adaptation," which were earlier used by Protestants and Catholics, respectively. The weakness of the former term, indigenization, was that it tended to relate the Christian message to the traditional
cultural forms, forms from which younger people were turning away under the pervasive influence of modernization, and the effect of that was to identify the gospel with the conservative elements in society. The weakness of the latter term, adaptation, was that it implied that what the missionary brought with him or her was the pure gospel, which had then to be adapted to the local culture.
It tended to obscure the fact that of course the gospel as embodied in the missionary's preaching and practice was already an adapted gospel, adapted to his own culture. The value of the word "contextualization" is that it suggests, in contrast to both of those words, the placing of the gospel in the total context of a culture at a particular moment, a moment which is both
shaped by the past and looking towards the future. The weakness, however, of this whole mass of missiological writing on the theme of contextualization is that while it has sought to explore the problem in all the cultures of humankind from China to Peru, it has largely ignored that culture which is the most widely-spread, powerful, and pervasive among
all contemporary cultures, namely, that which we are calling modern western culture. Moreover, this neglect is even more serious because it is this culture which more than almost any other is proving resistant to the gospel. In great areas of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, the church grows steadily and even spontaneously but in the areas dominated by this modern western culture,
whether in its capitalist or in its socialist political expressions, the church is shrinking, and the gospel appears to fall on deaf ears. It would seem therefore that there is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists that to ask the question that I am asking. What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and modern western culture? Or, to put the matter in a slightly different way,
can the experience of missionaries in the cross-cultural transmission of the gospel, and the work of the theologians who have worked on the question of gospel and culture within the parameters of our western culture, be usefully brought together to throw light on the central issue which I have posed? Let me begin with some preliminary definitions. By the world culture, I understand
the sum total of ways of living developed by a group of human beings and handed on from generation to generation. Central to culture is language. The language of a people provides the means by which they express their way of perceiving things and coping with things and around that central core of language, one would have to group their visual and musical arts,
their [techniques?], their law, their social and political organization, and of course, one must also include in culture and indeed as fundamental to any culture a set of beliefs, experiences, practices, which seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of things, that which gives shape and meaning to life, that which claims final loyalty. Obviously, I am speaking about religion. Religion, including the Christian
religion, is part of culture. In speaking of the gospel, I am of course referring to the announcement that in that series of events which has its center in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus, something has happened which alters the whole human situation, and which must therefore call in question every human culture. Now clearly
that announcement is itself culturally conditioned. It does not come down from heaven, or by the mouth of an angel. The words "Jesus Christ" are the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name and title, Joshua, the Messiah. They belong to one part of the culture of the world, not to China, or India, or Africa, but to a particular
place, the eastern Mediterranean at one point in history when Greek was the most widespread cultural language. Neither at the beginning, nor at any subsequent time is there or can there be a gospel which is not embodied in a culturally conditioned form of words. The idea that one can or could at any time separate out by some process of distillation, a pure gospel
unadulterated by any cultural accretions is of course an illusion. It is, in fact, more than an illusion. It is an abandonment of the gospel. For the gospel is about the Word made Flesh and consequently, every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are a part. And every style of life which claims to embody the truth of the gospel
is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet, the gospel which is from beginning to end embodied in culturally-conditioned forms, yet calls in question all cultures, including that in which it was originally embedded. What I hope to do, or what I hope to attempt
in the present course of lectures is as follows. Firstly, to look in general at the issues raised by the cross-cultural communication of the gospel. Secondly, to examine the essential features of our modern western culture, including present signs of its disintegration. Thirdly, to face the crucial question, "How can biblical authority be a reality for those who are shaped by our modern culture?"
Fourthly, to ask what would be involved in the encounter of the gospel with the central, intellectual core of our gospel, of our culture, which is modern science. Fifthly, to ask the same question in respect of our politics, and finally, to ask about the task of the church in bringing about this encounter. So, I begin by looking at what is involved in the cross-cultural
communication of the gospel. The New Testament itself, which chronicles the movement of the gospel from its origins in the cultural world of Judaism to its articulation in the language and practice of the Greek-speaking Gentile communities, provides us with the models from which we must begin. As a starting point, I find it illuminating to consider Paul's speech in the presence of King Agrippa
and his court as it is described in Acts 26. The cultural setting is that of the cosmopolitan, Greek-speaking world of the eastern Roman empire. Paul is speaking in Greek, but at the decisive moment of his story, he tells the court that when God spoke to Him, He spoke in Hebrew. "I heard a voice speaking to me in the Hebrew language," The language of the home
of the heart, the mother tongue. Paul is a citizen of that cosmopolitan, Greek-speaking world. He is addressing an audience that belongs to that world, but the word that changed the course of his life was spoken not in Greek, but in Hebrew, the language of the heart. But, and this is equally important, the word spoken to his heart while it accepts that language
as its vehicle, is not to affirm or approve the life that Saul is living, but to call it radically in question. "Why do you persecute me?" It is to show him that his most passionate and all-conquering conviction is wrong. That what he thinks is the service of God is in fact a warfare against God, that he is required therefore to stop
in his tracks, turn around, reverse the whole direction of his life, love what he had hated, cherish what he had sought to destroy. And, this is the third point. A voice which makes such a demand can only be the voice of the sovereign Lord Himself. No one but God has the right to contradict my devotion to God. "Who are You?"
is Paul's trembling question. The same question as that of Moses at the burning bush, "What is Your name?" The answer, "I am Jesus," means that henceforth Saul knows Jesus simply and absolutely as Lord. We have here, I suggest, a model of what is involved in the communication of the gospel across a cultural frontier. Firstly,
the communication has to be in the language of the hearer. It has to be such that it accepts at least provisionally the way of understanding things which is embodied in that language. If it does not do so, it will simply be an unmeaning sound which cannot change anything. But secondly, if it is truly the communication of the gospel, it will call radically in question that
way of understanding which is embodied in that language. If it is truly revelation, it must also be contradiction. The call therefore for conversion, for a radical metanoia, a u-turn of the mind, must be necessarily an implicate of it. And finally, this radical conversion can never be the achievement of any human persuasion, however
eloquent. It can only be the Word of God. True conversion, therefore, which is the proper end to which the communication of the gospel looks can only be a work of God, a kind of miracle, not natural, but supernatural. This pattern, this three-fold pattern, is brilliantly exemplified in the Johannine Gospel. John freely uses
the language and the thought forms of the religious world for which he writes. Much of it is suggestive of that sort of worldview which is often very imprecisely called "gnosticism" and which has obvious affinities with Indian thought. For this reason, the fourth gospel was early suspected of gnostic tendencies and has later been eagerly welcomed by Hindus as placing Jesus firmly within a typically Indian
worldview. Yet, John uses this language and these thought forms in such a way as to confront them with a fundamental question, indeed a contradiction. The logos is no longer an idea in the mind of the philosopher, or the ultimate experience of the mystic. The logos is this man, Jesus, who went the way of the cross.
In my own experience, I have found that Hindus who begin by welcoming the fourth Gospel as the one which speaks their language, which speaks to their hearts, end by being horrified when they understand what it is really saying. And so, logically, we move to the third of my three-fold points, to which John gives equal emphasis, that as Jesus puts it in the sixth chapter, "No one can come to Me unless the
Father draw him." The radical conversion of the heart, the u-turn of the mind which the New Testament calls metanoia, can never be the calculable result of a correct method of communication. It is something mysterious for which we can only say that our methods of communication may be, if God so wills, among the occasions for the miracle. And the same three-fold
pattern is exemplified in the experience of a missionary who, nurtured in one culture, seeks to communicate the gospel among peoples of another whose world has been shaped by a vision of the totality of things quite different from that of the Bible. He must first of all struggle to master the language. To begin with, he will think of the words that he learns simply as equivalents of the words that he uses in his own tongue
and which are listed in his dictionary as equivalents. But if he really immerses himself in the talk, the songs, the folktales, and the literature of the people, he will soon discover that there are no exact equivalents. All the words in any language derive their meaning, their resonance in the mind of those who use them, from a whole world of experience and a whole way of grasping that experience. So there are no exact
translations. He has to render the message as best he can, drawing as fully as he can upon the tradition of the people to whom he speaks. Clearly he has to find the path between two dangers. On the one hand, he may simply fail to communicate. He uses the words of the language, but in such a way that he sounds like a foreigner. His message is heard as the babblings of a man who has really nothing to say. Or, on the other hand,
he may so far succeed in talking the language of his hearers that he is accepted all too easily as a familiar character, a moralist calling for a greater degree of purity of conduct, or a guru offering another alternative path to salvation. His message then is simply absorbed into the existing worldview and heard as a call to be more pious, or better-behaved. In other words, to
sum it up; in the attempt to be relevant, he may fall into syncretism and in the effort to avoid syncretism, he may become irrelevant. In spite of these dangers, which so often reduce the effort of the missionary to futility, it can happen that in the mysterious providence of God, a word spoken comes with the kind of power that the word had which was spoken to Saul on the Damascus road.
Perhaps it is as sudden and cataclysmic as that. Or perhaps it is the last piece that suddenly falls into place and causes the pattern to make sense. The last experience in a long series that finally tips the scale. However, that may be, it causes the hearer to stop, to turn round, to go in a new direction, to accept Jesus as His Lord and Guide and Savior.
The Jesus whom the hearer thus accepts will be in the first instance the Jesus presented to him by the missionary. It will be Jesus as the missionary perceives Him, and it's only necessary to look at the visual representations of Jesus in the art of different people through the past centuries or to read the lives of Jesus written in the past 150 years,
to understand that Jesus is always perceived and can only be perceived through the eyes of a particular culture. Think of the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics, a kind of super-emperor, the pantocrator. Think of the Christ of the medieval crucifix, a drooping, defeated victim of the world's evil. Think of the Christ of liberal protestantism, an enlightened, emancipated
and successful member of the bourgeoisie. Or think of the Christ of the liberation theologians modeled on Che Guevara. It will inevitably be the Christ of the missionary to whom in the first instance the new convert turns and gives his allegiance. This may express itself in the adopting of styles of worship and dress and behavior copied from the missionary, sometimes to the
embarrassment of the latter. But this will only be in the first instance. The matter will not stop there, for the new convert will begin to read the Bible for himself, and as he does so, he will gain a ground from which he can look in a new way, both at his own culture and at the message which he has received from the missionary. And this will not happen suddenly. It is only as the fruit of sustained exposure to the Bible that one begins to see
familiar things in a new light. And in this light the convert will both see his own traditional culture in a new way and also observe that there are discrepancies between the picture of Jesus that he from within his culture finds in the Bible and the picture that was communicated to him by the missionary. And from this point on, there is a whole variety of possible developments. The convert's being released
or having realized that much of what they had first accepted from the missionary was shaped by the latter's culture, rather than by the gospel, may in reaction, turn back to his own culture and seek in a sort of hostile reaction to the invading culture to restate the gospel in terms of his traditional culture. Some of what is called third-world theology has primarily this negative orientation
rather than being primarily directed towards the communication of the gospel to those who are still within the traditional culture. What can also happen is that the missionary and through him, the church which he represents, can become aware of the element of syncretism in his own Christianity, of the extent to which his culture has been allowed to determine the nature of the gospel which he preaches, instead of being brought under judgement
by that gospel. And if that happens, there open up great possibilities for mutual correction. Each side perceiving Christ through the spectacles of one culture can help the other to see how much his vision has been blurred and distorted. And this kind of mutual correction is at the very heart of what we mean by the ecumenical movement. But even when this mutual correction does begin to take place,
it is still in the modern world under the shadow of the overwhelming preponderance of what I have called modern western culture. All the dialogue between the religions is being conducted in the languages of western Europe and this in itself determines its terms. Only that who have had what is called a modern education are equipped to take part in it. That means
that it is confined to those who have been more or less co-opted into the predominant modern western culture. Most of the missionary outreach across cultural boundaries still comes from churches which are part of this Western culture. Here, how then, one asks, how then can there be a general encounter of the gospel with this culture, a culture which has itself sprung from roots in western Christendom
and has lived with this culture in a kind of symbiotic relationship, not to say a syncretistic relationship ever since its first dawning. From where does the voice come which can challenge this culture on its own terms. A voice which speaks its own language and yet confronts it with the authentic figure of the crucified and living
Christ in such a way that it is stopped in its tracks, turned back from the way of death. One might think, perhaps, that the vision of that mushroom cloud which has haunted the hearts of modern western peoples ever since it first appeared over Hiroshima would be enough. But we know that fear does not bring deliverance. From where comes the voice, not of doom,
but of deliverance, that can be spoken so that the modern western world can hear it as the voice of its Savior and Lord. In starting from the simple model of a missionary in a cross-cultural communication of the gospel, I referred to the part played by the Bible. How does, or how can the Bible function in the confrontation of modern culture with the Bible,
with the gospel? In the next lecture, I have to examine in some depth the nature of this culture which we share but at this stage it is necessary to anticipate a little. Since the time of the Enlightenment, which, as I shall argue, is the point at which our modern culture emerges into full consciousness of itself, it has been impossible to speak of the Bible simply as the Word of God
in the way that earlier ages did. The Bible has been intensively studied during the past 250 years as part of the cultural history of mankind. We have been taught to recognize its immense diversity, the complexity of the processes through which it came to its present form, and the culturally conditioned character of the views of the world and of the human person which is contains. If a Christian who is
part of modern western culture says, "I accept Scripture as God's Word," that will be seen as a personal decision, one among a number of possible decisions, among which those of the Muslim, the Buddhist, or the positivist, and many others, could be counted. And one which must therefore be supported by arguments which a modern person can accept. Peter Berger
is among those who have written extensively about the possibility of Christian affirmation in the context of modern western culture. In his book, "The Heretical Imperative," he has argued persuasively that the distinctive feature of this culture is that there is no generally-accepted plausibility structure, acceptance of which is normally taken for granted without argument
and descent from which is regarded as heresy. That is to say, according to the original meaning of the word [haeresis?] as choosing for oneself, making one's own personal decision, instead of accepting the tradition. In pre-modern cultures, a heretic, the heretic was in a minority. In modern western culture, says Peter Berger, we are all required to be heretics.
There is no accepted plausibility structure and each of us has to make a personal decision as to ultimate beliefs. Here, therefore, we are all subject to the heretical imperative. In this situation, Berger describes three possibilities for Christian affirmation, which he calls, perhaps not very happily, deductive, reductive, and inductive.
The first simply selects one of the given traditions and reaffirms it, preferably in such a loud voice that other voices are reduced to silence. Of this strategy, he takes Karl Barth to be the most notable exponent. But after some rather respectful remarks about the great Swiss theologian, he finally rules him out of the discussion. Even 13 volumes of Dogmatics
are not enough to make your case if you cannot show rational grounds for taking this starting point, and not another. You may have heard the story of the lady who is alleged to have asked Karl Barth, "What was it that you were really trying to say in all those 13 volumes of Dogmatics?" And Barth is alleged to have replied, "What I was trying to say was,
Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." Well, Berger is of the opinion that it is not enough to say "The Bible tells me so" if you cannot give reasons for choosing the Bible, rather than the Quran, the Gita, or Das Kapital. The second, or reductive possibility, is typified in the Bultmann program of de-mythologizing.
Here the fact that the plausibility structure of traditional religious faith simply collapses in the atmosphere of secular urban society, is fully recognized. In effect, says Berger, Bultmann takes the mental world of the modern secular man as the criterion of what can be believed. When, in a famous phrase, Bultmann said, "One cannot
use electric light and radio, call upon modern medicine in case of illness, and at the same time, believe in the world of spirits and miracles of the New Testament." Berger points out that at this point, his man kann night was perhaps an unconscious echo of Luther's Ich kann nicht anders but the impossibility rested upon a
totally different perception of ultimate reality. In the end, the reductionist program takes the modern worldview as ultimate and must eventually jettison even those parts of the Christian tradition which Bultmann was seeking to safeguard. One does not need Jesus in order to embrace the existentialist view of life. Berger, therefore, opts for the third
alternative, which he calls the inductive. This is to take the universal human experience of what Berger called in another book, "signals of transcendence," the experience which is the presupposition of all theologies, whether of Barth or of Bultmann or of the Muslim, the Hindu, or the Buddhist, as the clue to the human situation. And of course, the paradigmatic figure here
is Schleiermacher. The way he pointed is, according to Berger, the only way forward in the condition of our modern secular worldview. The movement associated with the name of Karl Barth must be regarded as a temporary deviation and Berger is happy that theology is now returning to the main road. To the obvious question, how among the many signals of
transcendence does one distinguish the true from the false? Berger answers with the words of al-Ghazali, that they must all be weighed in "the scale of reason." He insists that in giving this answer he is not surrendering to a rationalism of the style of the Enlightenment. He defends what he calls "sober rational assessment" as the only way of distinguishing between true and false
religious experience; but he does not attempt to describe the criteria for assessment or the basis on which such criteria ought to be accepted. Perhaps the adjective "sober" has more than ordinary significance, for the context of al-Ghazali's image of the "scale of reason" is a passage in which he likens the actual religious experience to a kind of
drunkenness and goes on, and these are the words of al-Ghazali: "The words of lovers when in a state of drunkenness must be hidden away and not broadcast; but later their drunkenness abates and the sovereignty of their reason is restored -- and reason is God's scale on earth." That accords with Berger's own formulation
that religious certainty is located only within the enclave of religious experience itself, and cannot be had -- except "precariously in recollection" -- in the ordinary life of the world. It seems clear that the "sober rationality" with which we are to assess the values of different religious experiences does not belong to the enclave
but to the public world. It is not a kind of rationality which is rooted in the religious experience itself but one which judges that experience. And it is not difficult to see that it is the rationality which takes for granted the assumptions of our culture. I believe that Berger is correct when, in the earlier part of his book, he takes as fundamental to our modern Western culture the fact that it has
enormously enlarged the area in which the individual is free to make his own choices. A vast amount of what earlier ages and other cultures have simply accepted as given facts of life are now subject to human decision. With the aid of modern technology, modern man chooses where he will live, whom he will talk to,
how he will behave, what style of life he will adopt. He can, if he has successfully mastered the techniques of modern living, change at will his job, his house, his company, and his spouse. The old patterns of belief and behavior which ruled because they were not questioned have been largely dissolved. Each person makes his own decisions about what to believe
and how to behave. And it is therefore entirely natural that religion too is drawn into this way of understanding the human situation. It is natural, in a culture controlled by this kind of experience, that religion should also to be a matter of personal choice, unconstrained by any superhuman or supernatural authority. In that sense, Berger is right in saying
that we are all subject to the "heretical imperative." It is not my purpose to look at this moment on this whole way of understanding the world which is expressed in the modern western culture. We must do that in tomorrow's lecture. My point here is simply this: while Berger correctly shows how the traditional plausibility structures are dissolved by contact with this modern worldview,
and while he correctly reminds us that the prevalence and power of this worldview is no ground for believing it to be true, he does not seem to allow for the fact that it is itself a plausibility structure and functions as such. It is not that there is no socially accepted plausibility structure and therefore we make our own choices. This is the ruling plausibility structure, and we make our choices within its parameters. Berger's inductive method of dealing with the phenomenon of religion is itself
part of this plausibility structure. His sober rationality in contrast to the inebriation of religious experience is the rationality of this world-view. The public world, which he contrasts with those enclaves where religious
certainty is possible, the public world is the world governed by the assumptions of this world-view. The inductive method, which Berger espouses has been basic to the whole development of the modern scientific worldview from the time of Galileo onwards. If, instead of looking at Christianity from the point of view of the scientific worldview, we look for a moment at the
scientific worldview from the point of view of Christianity, we can see that its validity is both real and limited. It is real in the sense that it is a valid way of coming to the truth because, in the perspective of the Bible, the created world is both rational and contingent -- rational as the creation of God, who is light and not darkness,
and contingent because it is not an emanation of God but the creation of God, endowed by its Creator with a measure of autonomy. Consequently, by the study of things and happenings in the created world, we can arrive by processes of induction at a true understanding of things. That is the foundation upon which all science rests. But this inductive method has a validity, which is at the same
time limited in that it cannot decide this question: By whom and for what purpose was this whole world created? The answer to that question cannot be reached by any method of induction until history reaches its goal, because -- short of that point -- the data for an induction are not available.
Within the world-view of modern Western culture it is perfectly possible and legitimate to insist, as Berger does, that the phenomena of religious experience should be studied along with all the other facts that are available for information, and that conclusions should be drawn by induction from all these observations. In this way it is perfectly possible and right
to challenge a kind of narrow positivism which has sought to deny cultural acceptance to the data of religious experience. Berger is a true follower of Schleiermacher in seeking to commend religion to its cultured despisers, and in seeking to show that there is a proper place for religious affirmation within the plausibility structure of the modern scientific world-view. But all of this
procedure leaves that world-view unchallenged. The autonomous human person is still in the center -- with total freedom of choice. There is nothing simply given, which he must accept as the starting point for his inquiry. The whole method of inquiry and discussion simply excludes, in limine, the possibility that it might actually be the case that the One who
created and sustained the entire universe of created beings has personally made Himself known at a certain time and place in universal history. Any claim that this has actually happened is simply bracketed with other similar claims to be included in a syllabus for the comparative study of religion. In other words, it has been silenced by co-option into the modern scientific worldview.
The gospel is treated as an account of something which happened in one of the enclaves where religious experience takes place. It has to be brought out of that private enclave into the public world to be weighed in the scale of reason along with all the other varieties of religious experience. I shall argue later in this series that this dichotomy between the private and the
public worlds is fundamental to modern Western culture, and that if there is to be an effective encounter of the gospel with this culture, the understanding of this dichotomy is a prime requirement. But at this stage -- and in relation to Berger's argument -- something must be said. When Berger says that we are all, in modern Western societies, under the heretical imperative, he is of course right; and yet the
statement conceals as much as it explains. What it makes plain is the fact of what is commonly called "pluralism." In contrast to traditional societies, modern Western society leaves its members free, within very wide limits, to adopt and hold their own views about what is good and desirable, about what kind of life is to be admired, about what code of ethics should govern one's private life.
As a natural extension of this, with the growing presence in the western world of large numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, and Buddhists in the areas formerly designated as Christendom, it is assumed by a large number of Christians that the principle of pluralism applies here also. The rival truth-claims of the different religions are not felt to call for argument and resolution;
they are simply part of the mosaic; or perhaps better, the kaleidoscope of different values which go to make up the whole pattern. Berger's phrase "the heretical imperative" correctly renders this situation. There is no such thing as orthodoxy in the old sense. We are all heretics in the original meaning of the word; that is, we make our own decisions about what to believe.
And even orthodoxy, which now has to be called neo-orthodoxy, is just a particular style of heresy. All this is neatly expressed in Berger's phrase, the heretical imperative. What is concealed in that phrase, however, is that there is a world in which we are not heretics. There is a world of what are called "facts," as distinct from what are
called "values." In the latter world we are all free to choose what we will cherish and what we will neglect; in the world of values the heretical imperative operates. But it does not operate in the world of what our culture calls "facts;" here it is assumed that statements are either true or false. When statements of alleged facts are in contradiction with one another,
we do not simply leave it at that, much less congratulate ourselves on our faithfulness to the principles of pluralism. We argue, experiment, question, carry out tests, compare results, until we finally agree about what are the facts; and we expect then that all reasonable people will accept them. The one who does not accept them is the real heretic. Of course,
he will not be burned at the stake, but his views will not be published in the scientific journals and in the university lecture rooms. In respect of what are called "facts", and I am not, at the moment, pretending to define the word, because to do so will be a major part of our further study; I am simply using in the way that it is constantly used in ordinary speech. In respect of what are called facts,
a statement is either true or false. But in respect of what are called values, one does not use this kind of language. Value systems embodied in styles of living are not right or wrong, true or false. Here the operative principle is pluralism, respect for the freedom of each person to choose the values that he or she will live by. The way in which the concept of "facts"
functions in our culture is a matter to which we shall have to return in detail in the fourth lecture. It is in fact the centerpiece of the plausibility structure by which our society sustains itself. It is, if you like, the center of the temple, the ultimate object of veneration. Berger's use of the word enclave to designate that area in which the original religious experience
happens is, I think, very suggestive. He interprets the primal religious experiences which lie at the root of the great world religions -- the experience of the disciples with Jesus, or the experience of the prophet on the Night of Glory -- as varieties of a single phenomenon called religion, and asserts, here I quote, that "an investigation of the truth claims of any one of these
must be grounded in comparative and historical analysis. Christianity is not an exception to this. Christianity is one of the historically available religious forms, analyzable by the same empirical and phenomenological methods as all other forms." It follows, and I quote again, that "Christian theology cannot occur in a sanctuary that provides immunity
from the questions of historical science or of the other empirical disciplines." End of the quote. Religious experience, in other words, occurs in the sanctuary, but its claim to truth has to be tested in the public world of facts where scientific discipline operates. Individual religions may have value for those who profess them and are to be respected as such. But claims to truth have to be tested in the public
world where the principles of modern science operate. Here pluralism is not acceptable. No question is raised here about the presuppositions upon which these scientific disciplines operate. No place is given to the possibility that what was given in the religious experience might provide an insight into truth that could radically relativize the presuppositions of the scientific disciplines. The fact that Christian theology
cannot properly be done without facing questions raised by modern science and other world religions is correctly stated. But two things are simply taken for granted, without argument: firstly, that the essence of Christianity is the same as that of the other world religions, and secondly, that all the religions have to submit their truth-claims to the discipline of the scientific method. At this point we are all required to be orthodox
in respect of the plausibility structure which is called the modern scientific method. We are not allowed, at this point, to be heretics. The claim which is so massively presented in the fourth Gospel, that in the man Jesus, the One who is the Creator and Sustainer and Lord of the entire universe was actually present. That He is the light of the world, and that it
is only in that light that both the world religions and the whole structure of modern science will ultimately be seen as they truly are -- that belief is excluded in limine. It would not, of course, be labeled heresy. It would probably have to be described as invincible ignorance. But it is nonetheless excluded. My concern in these lectures
is to ask, How can that claim -- in all its winsomeness and awefulness -- be heard by the world of which we Western Christians are so much a part? In this first lecture I have simply tried in a preliminary way to ask what is involved in the encounter of the gospel with modern culture. In the next lecture, I want to speak more fully about the nature of this culture.
But the argument so far leads directly to one point which should be made now. I have talked about the separation between fact and value. In the next lecture we have to look at the origins of that separation. At this stage it is already clear that the separation corresponds to another division characteristic of our culture: namely that between the private and the public worlds. The public world is the world of facts
upon which all intelligent people are expected to agree -- or to be capable of persuasion. Of course, the vast majority depend, for most of the time for most of their information on experts in the various fields. But this dependence implies that we can trust the experts to be scrupulously honest and careful in their analysis and testing. It implies that their statements rest on evidence which could, if we had the time and training,
be verified by ourselves. Where there are contradictions between alleged facts, we expect that further investigation and discussion will resolve them. Contrasted with this is the private world where we are free to follow our own preferences in respect to personal conduct and lifestyle, provided that we do not prevent others from having the same freedom. There are no "right" or "wrong" styles
of life. Perhaps the only thing that is really wrong is to condemn as wrong the lifestyle of another. In the field of values, pluralism reigns. This separation of value from fact is reflected in the separation of the private and the public spheres which is one of the most characteristic features of our western culture. And, as I shall argue, the response of the
Christian churches -- or at least of the Protestant churches -- to the challenge of the Enlightenment was to accept the dichotomy and withdraw into the private sector. Having lost the battle to control education, and having been badly battered in its encounter with modern science, Christianity, at least in its Protestant form, has largely accepted relegation to the private sector, where it can
influence the choice of personal values for those who take this option. By doing so, it has secured for itself a continuing place, at the cost of surrendering the crucial field. As an option for the private field, as the protagonist for certain values, Christianity can enjoy considerable success. Churches can grow. People can be encouraged,
as the posters in General Eisenhower's day used to put it, to "join the church of [their?] choice." All this can happen. And yet the claim, the awesome and winsome claim of Jesus Christ to be alone the Lord of all worlds, the light that alone shows reality as it is, the life that alone endures forever -- that claim is effectively
silenced as far as the public life of our society is concerned. It remains, for our culture, just one of the varieties of religious experience for personal choice. One hundred and forty-three years ago, one of the greatest of English statesmen, William Ewart Gladstone, wrote these solemn and prophetic words, and with these, I close. Gladstone wrote: "Rome, the mistress
of state-craft, and beyond all other nations in the politic employment of religion, added without stint or scruple to her list of gods and goddesses, and consolidated her military empire by a skillful medley of all the religions of the world. Thus it continued while the worship of the Deity was but a conjecture or a contrivance; but when
the rising of the Son of Righteousness had given reality to the subjective forms of faith, and had made actual and solid truth the common inheritance of all men, then the religion of Christ became, unlike other creeds, an object of jealousy and of cruel persecution, because it would not be content to become a partner in this heterogeneous device, and planted itself upon
the truth, and not in the quicksand of opinion." And, in the same natural order, when Christianity became the religion of the state, it excluded every other system from public patronage. "Should the Christian faith ever become but one among many co-equal pensioners of a government, it will be a proof that subjective religion has again lost its God-given hold upon objective reality, or when,
under the thin shelter of its name, a multitude of discordant schemes shall have been put upon a footing of essential parity, and shall together receive the bounty of the legislature, this will prove that we are once more in a transition-state -- that we are traveling back again from the region to which the gospel brought us, towards that in which it found us." What Gladstone
foretold is essentially what has been happening during the past 140 years since he wrote. The end result is not, as we once imagined, a secular society. It is a pagan society, and its paganism, because it is a post-Christian paganism, having been born out of the rejection of Christianity,
is far more resistant to the gospel than any pre-Christian paganism can ever be. It is the most challenging missionary frontier in the world today and it is with that frontier that we shall be concerned in the ensuing lectures.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Bishop Newbigin, you have touched a nerve and we thank you for that. Dr. Newbigin will be speaking again tomorrow afternoon at 4:45 in the large lounge in the campus center. His topic will be "Profile of a Culture; the Inward and the Outward Forms of Modernity."
We look forward to seeing you then and we thank you for coming tonight. Good evening.